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Comment by smoody | Hacker News Reader

I was in a small meeting at an investment bank with Jobs when he was at his lowest point (1994? 1995?). There were probably three of us in the room with him. He was literally begging us to use the NeXT platform for even just a small test project -- offering to do whatever would be needed to get the deal done. I swear, it nearly brought a tear to my eye -- seeing my industry idol so desperate. Fast forward 15 year and Apple's market cap is higher than that investment bank's market cap. And let's not forget about how Steve turned $5mm into billions with his Pixar investment and nurturing.

Great people bounce back. Steve Jobs is like flubber -- he gains more momentum with each bounce.

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My bank (UBS - it was called Swissbank at the time) ended up buying thousands of NeXT systems during the nineties. We used them for everything - desktops, servers, developement platform. As a desktop - NeXT step was years ahead of the alternatives available at the time (Windows 3.x). I remember logging into my NeXT machine every day and thinking "wow - that's what the computing of the future will be like". At one point, we stopped buying "real" black NeXT systems, and started putting NeXT x86 onto white Compaq computers. Then Windows 95 came along, and the rest was history..

We still have a bunch of old NeXT cubes gathering dust in a store room. I wonder what they would fetch on eBay these days..

I'll take one!

Just for the history of the thing, I thought the NeXT together with the Acorn 'Unicorn' were some of the nicest machines made at the time. SGI was neat stuff too but overly massive (I can see why though, given the amount of gear in a 4D70 or personal Iris).

NeXT cubes in working condition still fetch $500 on ebay.

Would that have been First Boston? Didn't they wind up buying over a thousand of them at one time? Apparently it was great to create apps.

Apparently it was great to create apps.

It was Objective-C, Interface Builder, similar tools to what Cocoa is today. All the cool app building tools for the Mac were born on NEXTSTEP.

Cocoa IS Nextstep - which is why the class names are prefixed NS

Trivia: actually "NS" stands for "NeXT & Sun". Old NeXT classes had an NX* prefix. (There are still a few of those lingering in Cocoa.)

The NS prefix was adopted as part of the NextStep -> OpenStep transition around 1993, when Sun was planning to use OpenStep as their main desktop environment. That never happened because soon Sun got Java religion and dumped OpenStep.

I didn't know that. In fact everywhere I have read, it is assumed that NS stands for NeXTStep. Thanks!

I didnt know that either! Cheers

No, it was a different investment bank. They eventually bought one or two NeXT systems, but the developers that championed them were considered 'radicals' within the company. As with many other IBs, this one was a Sun company through and through.

Lots of investment banks used NeXT. First Chicago, Bank of America (earlier Nationsbanc, even earlier Chicago Research & Trade), Swiss Bank Corp, UBS, Merrill Lynch. Etc. Plus smaller shops like Soros.

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